Making money green: Australia takes its first steps towards a net zero finance strategy
Retrieved on:
Wednesday, November 8, 2023
Zero, ASX, Future Super, Vanguard, Technology, Australian Securities and Investments Commission v Rich, Government, Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, Farm, Climate, Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, Conversation, Tesla, Coal mining, Disclosure, Wind, Research, Leadership, Minister for Green Skills, Circular Economy and Biodiversity, Prudential regulation, Investment Commission, Neoen, Environment, First Nations, GDP, Net Zero Directorates, Growth, Hornsdale Power Reserve, ASIC, Risk, Private sector, Partnership, Goal, Lead, Spencer Gulf, Rage, Investment, The Conversation, Climate change, Industry, Renewable energy, Bank, Whaling, Security (finance), Risk management
This article is part of a series by The Conversation, Getting to Zero, examining Australia’s energy transition.
Key Points:
- This article is part of a series by The Conversation, Getting to Zero, examining Australia’s energy transition.
- Just north of Jamestown in South Australia, 70 kilometres east of the Spencer Gulf and next to a wind farm of nearly 100 turbines, stands the world’s first big battery.
- Australia aspires not only to transition its economy to net zero emissions, but to become a green energy superpower.
The size of the green finance challenge
- These financial flows need to grow by 21% a year, on average.
- Without this enormous increase, the economic transition will not happen in time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
- Successive Australian governments have been slow to grasp this reality, and we are now playing catch-up with many other countries.
Australia releases its strategy
- The Australian government’s Sustainable Finance Strategy, released by Treasurer Jim Chalmers last Thursday, lays solid foundations for this recovery.
- Yet more needs to be done if Australia is to achieve the strategy’s stated ambition to be a global sustainability finance leader.
- The strategy is arranged around three core pillars.
- Read more:
How to beat 'rollout rage': the environment-versus-climate battle dividing regional AustraliaLarge companies will also be required to disclose their net zero transition plan, if they have one.
Fighting greenwashing
- ASIC Deputy Chair Karen Chester believes the economic cost and loss of investor confidence caused by greenwashing “cannot be overstated”.
- Her organisation has set out guidelines to help financial institutions identify it.
- These bonds are designed to establish standards for lending and borrowing for all green finance; they will also help the government to fund projects such as electric vehicle charging infrastructure.
What’s missing from the strategy?
- And Australia ranks only 30th in a list of countries on its share of talent for green finance.
- If the financing of the transition were a bicycle race, Australia has now caught up to the global peloton.
Alison Atherton is a member of the Australian Sustainable Finance Institute's Capability Reference Group Gordon Noble does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.